CSIRO Honorary Fellow Speaks On What IPCC Left Out - "All Hell Is About To Break Loose"

[hatrack]

EDIT

CSIRO honorary fellow Barrie Pittock, speaking yesterday at the launch of the University of Adelaide's Research Institute for Climate Change and Sustainability, said the panel's models had left out many factors.

"Climate change is happening, there's no doubt about that, it's happening faster than the models predicted it would," he said. Dr Pittock said more extreme warming could be explained "because of changes that increase the global warming".

One example is melting of arctic sea ice which leads to greater absorption of sunlight - which in turn leads to further warming and so more melting of sea ice.

"There are quite a number of such effects which are very important and have been observed to be happening," Dr Pittock said. These effects were not factored in to IPCC models because the science was considered uncertain.

EDIT

http://www.news.com.au/adelaidenow/story/0,22606,22239280-5006301,00.html

[ramapo]

1. Like watching a train wreck

I wonder about what reality is...

I torture myself day in and day out, reading all this stuff, and I've gotten to the point where driving the car to work has me looking at all the other commuters and feeling like we're lemmings headed for the cliff.

There is just so much evidence that the tipping point is past, and what is now a behind-the-scenes trickle will become a torrent of events as nature reacts to the insults that we've hurled.

Yet, everybody I know is either completely ignorant or only vaguely aware of what is taking place, and those with some awareness don't really believe that anything truly "bad" can happen.

So I wonder...is something really "bad" happening or will things just fester for the foreseeable future as our environment slowly cooks.

[Dead_Parrot]

2. Some years ago...

I was barrelling down a country lane near my parent's house, when I swerved to avoid a bit of local wildlife and hit a patch of mud. I spent the next four or five seconds - it seemed like a week - in an uncontrollable sideways skid at about 50mph, reflecting on my misfortune, lack of driving ability, and the proximity of a very solid telegraph pole and what it would do to me and the car.

I was right about what it did to the car. Messy.

I've got the same feeling again, except this time I can't just go and buy a new car and take some advanced driving lessons.
And everybody I love is in the car.
And there's no seatbelts.

I can't even blame the whole mess on a fucking rabbit (who escaped unharmed, you'll be pleased to know).

[DCKit]

11. OUCH.

The one piece of advice I try to impart to all new drivers is "if it's smaller than a cow, don't swerve." I love animals, but I love me more and I'd rather fix a front-end than my broken, crushed body.

Another thing the global warming folks often neglect to mention is that once the polar seas begin to heat up, it's a hop and a skip to warmer polar air masses and there go the Greenland glaciers and the arctic permafrost. I'm not sure how high the thawing of Greenland alone would raise sea levels, but I'll bet that NY, Philadelphia, DC, Miami, NO and several other of our favorite cities would follow Atlantis under the waves in a decade or less. When the permafrost thaws, billions of tons of methane and CO2 will be released from the tundra, further accelerating global warming.

After that mess, there are the changes to the shape of the planet's crust when tens of billions of tons of water are displaced and some areas rise while others sink. The earthquakes are going to be amazing.

Isn't the new Paraguay ranch on a high plateau?

[GliderGuider]

12. It's worse than just sea levels

Warmer polar seas mean less temperature differential between the poles and the equator. That differential is what drives the thermo-haline circulation aka the global ocean conveyor belt.

CO2 -> global warming -> melting permafrost -> methane release -> runaway global warming -> loss of polar/equator temperature differential -> THC shutdown -> loss of oceanic downwelling -> anoxic oceans -> growth of sulfur reducing oceanic bacteria -> atmospheric H2S -> Permian Extinction II.

Coming soon to a planet near you.

Paul Chefurka

[Dead_Parrot]

13. Easier said than done, sometimes.

"Why the fuck did I do that?" was one of the things I thought. But hey, it's good practise for kids running out.

The Paraguay ranch is on a plateau - but it's also on the edge of the Amazonian desert (coming soon to a continent near you):

[DCKit]

14. Agreed, but the ranch is underlain by one of the largest aquifers in SA. n/t

[Delphinus]

3. I'd like to know how ...

Nature has been holding climate change at bay ... seriously, any thoughts?

Institute director Professor Barry Brook says an article recently published in the journal Science says that nature has been holding climate change at bay but "all hell is about to break loose" from 2009.

[Dead_Parrot]

5. There are some negative feedback systems...

The oceans can absorb quite a lot of CO₂, but that's limited by the amount in there;
Plants can grow faster in a CO₂ richer atmosphere (taking up CO₂ as they go), but only if the rainfall pattens remain intact and they don't have to deal with new diseases and parasites;
Increased evaporation leads to increased cloud cover, which increases the albedo (but also traps more heat - it's a tricky one);
The ~100 Gt of ice that melted last year from Greenland sucked about 32EJ of heat from the air as it went (but also decreased the albedo)...

Google up "negative climate feedbacks" for more. Some of them offer only a brief respite, or put a longer-term positive feedback in place at the same time.

None of them can deal, long term, with the rate of change we're forcing on the biosphere.

[Delphinus]

6. Thanks, Dead_Parrot.

I always appreciate what people share so my knowledge can increase. :hi:

[Dead_Parrot]

8. No worries

There are no stupid questions... :)

[phantom power]

9. it might be more accurate to say "buffers."

The oceans have been a huge buffer, but now that buffer is full.

[kestrel91316]

4. I hate to be the bearer of very bad news, but.......

IMHO the models are broken. The old rules don't apply. The train wreck is a runaway.

"....it's happening faster than the models predicted it would....."

[hatrack]

7. Terra incognita

Which is exactly the world we're creating - not good or bad or inhospitable or welcoming per se, but simply radically different and unpredictable.

Not even unknown, for that matter, but in a bigger sense, unknowable - there is a point at which projection and imagination will fail, simply because the variables are piling up so quickly and in such complexity that our knowledge and modeling of natural systems will simply not be up to the task of figuring out what to do next.

[bonito]

10. Things as they are

I wish we could see some talk of using it as an advantage planing canals for dams to enhance energy demand, taking what we can for the good of civilization.